


Shame the Devil

by orphan_account



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Dark, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:50:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick deals with his guilt, Bruce reflects on happier times, and Tim bears the brunt of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey fellas! This is chapter one of what will likely be a four-part series. I really hope you enjoy! Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Tim caught the flicker of Alfred's gaze in the rearview mirror.

"Shall I adjust the temperature, Master Timothy?"

"No, I'm fine," he answered, dazed.

Orange street lights flashed by in the gloss of his eyes. The car paused briefly at an intersection and Tim made out the letters of a bright sign through the halo of its neon shine: P-I-Z-Z-A. Then the car was moving again, and the colors bled together in an eerie radioactive glow.

When he shuddered again Alfred turned the heat up very slightly, though Tim hardly registered the cold.

"I guess I should've called him, huh?" he muttered after another stretch of silence.

"Master Richard is quite convivial," Alfred assured him gently, "I doubt he'll be anything but pleased to see you."

Tim smiled distantly and gave a nod as an afterthought.

"Dick's pretty…pretty easy-going," he agreed.

"Very much so, Master Timothy."

A certain fondness crept into Alfred's tone any time they discussed Dick, but it was nothing Tim begrudged him: after all, he felt the same warmth directed toward him. He could feel the concerned glances periodically reflected at him by the rearview mirror, and so he mustered his least conspicuous contented smile, and reclined against the seat.

Finally they arrived at Dick's apartment building, a moderately priced tower of studios and lofts in Blüdhaven's downtown. It wasn't somewhere Tim liked the thought of Alfred being alone at night, and so when the man rounded the car to open his door, he regarded him with a shade of worry.

"You gonna be okay to make it back, Alfred?" he asked, pulling his hastily packed duffle bag behind him, "It's really late."

"I expect I shall be just fine," Alfred assured him, leading him to the doorman with a paternal hand on his shoulder. "Take care, Master Timothy."

"Thanks, Alfred. I'll call tomorrow, okay?"

"Of course, sir," Alfred returned, already headed back to the car. But he did look over his shoulder, and he did smile, albeit weakly.

The doorman let him in, and Tim showed himself through the empty lobby to the bank of elevators, all of which were open and vacant at the late hour. Dick lived on a high floor by his own choosing, not because of any expectation of safety, but because it made leaping from the windows so much more satisfying.

He paused at Dick's door and shifted his duffle bag onto his shoulder before knocking, softly at first, then insistently.

Dick rattled through the locks and chains and opened up in only a pair of low-slung sweatpants, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Recognition dawned, and he pulled the door open wide, inviting Tim in.

"Hey, buddy. Long time, no see. Hey – you okay, Tim? How's it going?"

Tim hardly had time to squeeze in his flood of apologies for arriving so late, unannounced to boot. Dick seemed not to hear them. As soon as Tim was inside with the door shut and locked behind him, Dick caught him by the shoulder and folded him into a hug.

When he pulled back, he held Tim's chin.

"I'm really sorry for, uh, I mean I meant to give you a call, but –"

"Hush with that," Dick chided him, "what's the story on this shiner?"

"I guess training got a little out of control," Tim lied. Dick ran his thumb along the edge of the bluish bruise, newly blooming from fresh red swelling.

"Let me get you an ice pack," he decided, withdrawing to the kitchenette. "You can pull out the couch, right? Hang on, I've got some spare sheets in the hall closet."

"Yeah, I've got it," Tim answered.

While he peeled the cushions off the couch and began to fold out the bed concealed in it, Tim desperately hoped that Dick wouldn't detect his deception. It was a minor one, so far as Tim was concerned, or at least a long-standing one.

Dick appeared momentarily with a stack of folded sheets and an ice pack, the latter of which he handed off to Tim.

"Gimme a hand?"

"Sure."

The two of them tugged on the fitted sheet together, and then laid the loose top sheet over it. Dick produced a shaggy throw blanket from the back of a recliner and laid it over the bed, and then sank down into the chair, watching Tim as he climbed onto the creaking mattress.

"You hungry, buddy? There's some pizza in the fridge. Not half bad, either."

"I'm good," Tim shook his head.

"Well, if you feel like it, you're welcome to it."

"Thanks, Dick."

An uneasy pause passed during which Tim shuffled out of his shirt beneath the blankets and Dick looked away, hesitating.

"Tim, you wanna give me the real story on that bruise?"

_No, I don't._

Tim detested lying to Dick. It just seemed low, especially when Dick was so openly and earnestly invested in the truth.

"Just got into it with Bruce," he admitted, "it was dumb. Not a big deal."

"What happened?" Dick pressed. "Really, Tim."

The heavier blanket slid down and revealed Tim's white shoulders, thinner and paler than Dick's, though angular and sinewy from hard training. At their crests were a few angry red smudges of color in the shape and pattern of fingers.

"I don't know," Tim deflected, "he's probably just under a lot of stress right now. You know how it goes."

He held the ice back to his temple. Dick watched his shoulders, noting that the rising bruises tapered backward, suggesting that Tim had been held from behind, not grappled with head-on. His expression darkened.

"I do know how it goes," Dick agreed pointedly. "I was around a long time, remember? I know just about every which way it can go."

"Yeah."

Tim sank down in the blankets and eased onto his back, waiting silently for Dick to turn the lights out. He moved gingerly, favoring his shoulders and lower back, and though Dick had more to ask, he realized that Tim had nothing more to say.

"Well, sweet dreams, Timmy. If anything – if you wanna talk about anything, I mean," he stood, his hand at the back of his neck, worrying at the nape, "if you've got anything you wanna say, you know, come get me, okay?"

"Ok, Dick. Thanks for putting me up tonight. I'll make it up to you, promise."

"Don't mention it," Dick answered, switching off the light.

He left his bedroom door unlocked in case Tim did decide to come talk during the night, though he doubted that the boy would take him up on the offer. On some level he desperately wanted to go wring an answer out of him somehow, no matter what it took.

Then again, he realized with a sickly sinking feeling that he likely knew _exactly_ what had transpired. It wasn't something he wanted to believe, but then again it was nearly impossible not to.

_Those bruises._

Dick returned to bed after stripping out of his sweats, though he was wide-awake and alert with anxiety. He hooked an arm around a pillow and dragged it against his chest and then stared into the mellow urban darkness, tinged with the neon colors of the city outside his window.

Guilt overwhelmed him, and he remembered.

* * *

" _Then when the hurdy-gurdy man comes singing songs of…_ "

Dick half-hummed, half-sang, lathering his thick dark hair and then stepping beneath the searing hot spray of the shower, spitting a little as soap slipped into the corners of his open mouth.

" _Hurdy-gurdy…hurdy-gurdy…he sang…_ "

The echo in the marble shower added the right effect. Usually Dick wasn't impressed with his signing at all, though he _did_ quietly commend himself on his whistling. He made sure to soap down well: showering before bed hadn't always been his preference, but lately Bruce had insisted, owing to his getting older. Fifteen and vigorous, Dick was given to smelling of sweat by the end of long patrols, and not just the salty-sweet sort typical of children. Now there was a peculiar musky scent as well, one that clung unfavorably to bed sheets.

"Getting close to done, chum?" Bruce called from the doorway. Dick jumped, and then laughed.

"Sure thing," he answered, "just rinsing off."

"Everything alright?"

"Yeah! You just spooked me a little. Guess I was daydreaming."

Dick rinsed his hair and skin and wrapped a towel around himself hastily as he stepped out into the steam. He spared only a brief moment to tousle his hair with the towel, just enough to sop up the drops falling from the ends.

After brushing his teeth and swishing a gulp of mouthwash he stepped into his briefs and tugged on a plain t-shirt, his usual summer sleep clothes. He emerged into the cool, humid darkness of Bruce's bedroom, which always seemed to him sonorously quiet and settled, cavernous. He crept across the carpet and slid into bed, rolling his shoulders once before laying down.

They had slept this way for some time. Dick had been afraid of the dark as a young boy, and Bruce had indulged his fear by allowing him to sleep next to him. By puberty, when Dick had seen much too much in the clear light of day to find the dark particularly upsetting anymore, he had continued to sleep with Bruce because of the nightmares, the ones so vivid and horrifying that he had to be held to return to sleep.

Sometimes they still came, and sometimes Bruce held him regardless, as a kind of preventative measure. Dick treasured the comfort.

He felt the blankets rise behind him as Bruce raised his arm.

"Huddle up," he murmured.

Dick maneuvered easily backward until his damp t-shirt was pressed against Bruce's broad chest. It wasn't out of the ordinary for Bruce to be without a shirt in bed during the warm summer months. Nor was it atypical for him to lay his arm, thick and heavy with muscle, over Dick's comparatively narrow waist.

He fell asleep that way, with the hard heartbeat behind him pulsing a subtle rhythm that he could count time to, one-two, one-two, one-two…

It was dark when Bruce shifted, and a jolt of sensation awoke Dick with a gasp. He couldn't even discern, right then, what it was he had felt so _strongly_ ; there was just the shadow of a spreading warmth, and he licked his dry lips as he accounted for his faculties, hoping Bruce wasn't awake –

"It's alright, Dick," Bruce said, soft and low. Dick felt the vibration of his voice through his thin t-shirt and gulped.

"B-bruce," he stuttered.

It was now clear – painfully so – that Bruce's hand was resting against the strained fabric of his briefs, stroking gently, and that he was completely, embarrassingly hard.

"It's normal for lads your age," Bruce breathed against his ear. Dick shuddered and stilled as best he could, unable to compose his thoughts.

Naturally this sort of thing had happened before, mostly in the shower or early in the morning, when Dick could attend to himself on his own time.

"I'll – I can go, um, ha-handle it," he volunteered, flushing with humiliation that somehow didn't soften him. Bruce squeezed the firm line of his penis through his underwear, and Dick groaned.

"Let _me_ help you, Dick."

Nothing in Bruce's tone – husky and brusque as it had grown during the last few moments – suggested to Dick that there was any real room for refusal. He swallowed hard again and felt a lump rise anyhow; suddenly he worried that he might cry, and nothing he could imagine mortified him more, even accepting the advance.

After all, he reasoned, Bruce had given him so much –

"Have you _handled_ yourself before, Dickie?"

He nodded. Sweat rose on his chest and shoulders. He was mute, and faintly nauseous.

"Show me," Bruce rasped, his hand circling Dick's wrist and guiding it down to his penis, where a small wet stain had formed at the front of his briefs.

Trembling, Dick hooked his thumb in the waistband of his briefs and pushed clumsily downward, gasping when his cock bounced against his belly. The voice at the shell of his ear went on, muttering things, and the tone reminded him of the one reserved for patrol-use, deep and dark and intimidating. He could not stop shivering.

"Easy, easy," Bruce urged him. For a moment he could hear the warmth he expected, and in some sense desperately _needed_ from him, but it was momentarily displaced by heavy breathing.

Dick began to move his hand on his penis, awkwardly at first, before realigning his grip; when he had centered himself in his palm, he curled his body inward slightly, and tried to focus on the sensation of his foreskin engulfing the sensitive head as he forced it up and down.

Bruce slipped his fingers between his thighs and cupped his balls, tracing the pad of his thumb along the seam of his sac. Dick's impulse was to close his legs and fend off the strange invasive feeling, but the width of Bruce's hand kept his thighs parted, and his fingers continued to search, probe.

The tip of his forefinger came to rest against Dick's hole, circling and then tapping lightly.

"Pl-please," Dick panted, now close to climax, however strange, "not that, please."

"Not tonight," Bruce agreed in that same throaty whisper. "Go on, Dickie."

His hand came to rest on the boy's hip, squeezing him in time with his own movements, though it was only when Dick felt himself pulled back against the rigid length of Bruce's own cock that he came, dizzy and weak, into his hand.

He regained his senses in the way that a fever breaks to chills: suddenly, and with a great shudder. Bruce was stroking his flank, gently easing his t-shirt back down over his wet belly, and then tugging his underwear up again, tucking his softening penis inside.

"The um," Dick murmured, cotton-mouthed, "the sheets, I should –"

"Tomorrow," Bruce assured him.

The approval in his voice – now rich and smooth as ever - comforted him at first blush. But as he drifted into uneasy sleep he could not help but imagine it as payment of some kind.


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! Part 3 is coming soon. Thanks for all the reads, and please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

After a soft knock, Alfred appeared in Bruce's bedroom doorway in his driving jacket, with the keys to the town car looped over the fingers of his right hand. He gave a cordial nod.

"I shall be taking Master Timothy to spend the night with Master Richard," he reported, staring pointedly past Bruce.

"Alright," Bruce returned slowly, "take care."

Alfred disappeared without his customary good-night, which bore its intended sting. Bruce surmised that the midnight trip to Dick's hadn't been Tim's idea: if it had been, Alfred surely would have said that he had been _asked_ to take Master Timothy elsewhere, not that he simply _was._

And so, Bruce concluded, Alfred knew what had transpired, or at least some part of it. Surely he had scrubbed bloody rings around the bathtub drain on enough occasions to put together that something wasn't altogether right, though Bruce supposed he could have chalked it all up to the regular tribulations of patrol and combat, had he really wanted to.

But that now seemed unlikely. Bruce raked a hand through his hair and strode aimlessly into the hallway, which in the absence of Alfred's presence seemed dreadfully cold and empty.

He walked without direction, running his hand over the polished bannisters lining the upper floor corridors that overlooked the foyer below. Long shadows stretched across the hard wood, crossing one another in patches of deep blackness. A little light emanated from some chamber further up an east-wing hallway, interrupting the gloom. When Bruce followed it to its source, he found himself at the entrance to Tim's room.

It smelled of him, like green spearmint. Books were stacked on the desk, as were scores of neatly kept filing folders stuffed with photographs and stapled documents. A Gotham Knights pennant flag was pinned to the wall above his bed, along with a couple of band posters and some photographs of family. Two empty wire hangers on the floor of his closet suggested hastily packed t-shirts, and his white sneakers were conspicuously missing.

Bruce lingered for a long moment, and then switched off the light.

Only a few doors down was the only room in the house that he really avoided. Life and death passed freely through Wayne Manor; every chamber had housed some relative, ancient or recent, who had gone on to die. When they had been alive, Bruce's parents had been fond of recounting the history of various spaces, keeping proud record of this occupant now passed, that visitor long lost. It lent a stately dignity to the home, anchoring it in history.

Then there was Jason's room. Bruce paused with his hand above the knob, trying to convince himself not to turn it.

But he did. The hinges groaned and the carpet gave up a heave of dust when he entered, switching the light on. Only one bulb in the fixture still flickered to life, casting the room in a precarious golden demi-glow. Bruce slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks and stood at the center of the room, regarding it in full.

Jason had collected things. Little things, at first. A bowl of foreign coins remained at the edge of his nightstand, now brimming with obsolete currencies. Upon the wall above his bed, autographs from various members of the Justice League hung on loose thumbtacks. His cassette tapes were arranged in stacked milk crates by the name of the band and the date of the album; there must have been hundreds. Bruce leaned close to run a thumb over the thin veil of dust coating their spines, and then settled heavily on the edge of the bed.

For some time after his induction as Robin, Jason had campaigned for a waterbed. A simple 'no' would have been enough to settle the matter with Dick, but Jason had persisted, and when Bruce had _finally_ been prepared to relent on the occasion of his birthday, he had changed his mind.

Or rather: the point had become moot. Shortly before his fifteenth birthday, he had begun sleeping in Bruce's bed, and he had never returned to his own.

It was no use, reclining and drawing Jason's pillow against his face with both arms. Jason had hardly ever slept on it and it had been laundered since his passing at any rate, but Bruce buried his nose against it anyhow, searching desperately for some sign of him.

He had done Dick wrong. He knew that, and it burdened him. Tim, he realized dully, was also a victim.

But Jason he had loved unlike a son. And he had never stopped needing him.

* * *

The storm outside the manor was so furious Bruce couldn't sleep. Branches whipped incessantly at his windowpanes and wind shrieked in the sill, interrupted only by crashes of thunder and brilliant bursts of lightening. Convinced that he would not sleep until the worst of it had passed, Bruce rose from bed and dressed in slacks and an undershirt before emerging into the dark corridor, headed for his office.

For once he had the opportunity to attend to genuine Wayne Enterprises business, unimpeded by his greater pursuits. There had been recent talk of switching the investment firm used to maintain the annuity fund set aside for employees' retirement. Naturally there was dissent; there always was when changes were made, but some of the accusations leveled against the new investment firm had piqued his interest – specifically the charge that they invested with companies who profited from human trafficking.

Bruce let himself into his office as a glaring bolt of lightening struck the grounds outside the high, peaked window. His shadow flashed on the opposite wall, and for a moment he was blinded. When his vision adjusted to the darkness again he crept to his desk and slid into the chair behind it, tugging the chain of an antique lamp.

He had a list of companies he had for sometime suspected of underhanded dealings with slave traders. Most of them outsourced to eastern bloc countries behind the Iron Curtain, where information on human trafficking was systematically blotted out. Nonetheless Bruce had his sources, mostly former family friends with cushy embassy jobs who could send floppy discs through diplomatic courier.

They presumed, Bruce suspected, that his interest in contemporary slavery was either prurient or passing. It was in his best interest to stoke their suspicions in order to obscure his real purpose, so he often requested the sort of hardcore pornography available in certain segments of the Russian underground along with whatever information they could obtain on the sale and purchase of humans.

Thus, in the lower locked drawers of his heavy mahogany desk, a number of large padded envelopes remained opened but stuffed with their original contents, a mix of discs of data and obscene magazines.

He peeled open the lip of an envelope, spilling its contents. Each of the discs was labeled in casually written script: _s.m.j. corp. wright-wrigley j. inc. sinbar ent._

Some of them were familiar. He stacked the discs he intended to look into, and leaned down to withdraw a print-out listing the internal data he'd been faxed by a friend at the investment firm. Lightening flashed, the lights flickered, and when he righted himself in his chair, there was a shadow in the doorway.

Alfred would have announced himself. In a split second thunder followed the burst of lightening, and the shadow waivered.

"Bruce?"

He exhaled.

"Come in, Jason."

Since his arrival at the manor two years ago, Jason had been skittish in the dark and wary of the estate's strange shadows and uncanny noises. In storms his fear intensified, and Bruce sometimes let him join him in bed.

Not that it was a habit he had been happy to resume. So far he had only _slipped up_ , as it were, twice: he had asked Jason to masturbate for him after a particularly successful patrol, and had rubbed himself to climax on his belly during a sparring match. Unlike Dick, Jason had been perfectly willing to do more, go further, to touch, be touched – Bruce quickly gathered he was skilled due to experience in that dismal profession, and had committed himself to chaste exchanges only from thereon out. Jason needed to heal, and Bruce wanted that for him.

Still he regarded the boy with a weary look as he crossed the study and sank into the heavy, high-backed chair adjacent to the desk. It was difficult sometimes, especially with all his advances and incredible adolescent beauty, to ignore him.

"Sorry," Jason muttered, fiddling with the hem of his pajama shirt.

"It's very late," Bruce agreed, returning to the lower drawer briefly to lock it again. While he was bent down, Jason leaned over the desk, observing his work.

"Woah," he grinned, and between his teeth there was the smallest gap, only noticeable enough to make his broad smile terribly endearing.

"That's – part of a case –" Bruce quickly retrieved one of the Russian magazines Jason had snatched up off the desk.

"Some case," Jason laughed, "d'you need help?"

"Not at the moment," Bruce returned evenly. " _You_ should be in bed."

Jason shifted, settling back in the chair.

"Don't feel like it," he replied, "not alone, at least."

He looked up sheepishly, with that spare edge of defiance. Bruce watched lightening whiten his blondish eyelashes, and nodded slowly.

"For tonight," he agreed.

"So, uh, that magazine…"

"Is not good evening reading."

"Ha-ha. What's the story on the case? Somebody selling skin?"

"Selling _slaves_ ," Bruce corrected him, tucking the envelope back in the low drawer. "Or so it seems."

"What's the difference?" Jason wondered, glancing away. "Nobody who gets sold gets paid what they earn. When there's a middle man…"

Bruce felt a distinct pang in his chest. He stood and laid a hand on the boy's shoulder, guiding him to stand.

"We'll figure it out," he assured him as they strode down the dark corridor, Bruce moving easily, and Jason following uncertainly at his side.

A light still glowed in Bruce's bedroom. Jason seemed relieved to be out of the roiling dark of the main manor, and climbed into bed without so much as a look back.

Bruce disappeared into the adjoining bathroom, where he regarded himself for a long time in the mirror.

_Think this through. Don't let him down._

He splashed a few handfuls of cold water against his face and then returned to the bedroom. Jason had already burrowed underneath the blankets on his chosen side of the bed. From beneath the covers piled up around his neck and shoulders Bruce could only see the messy profile of his dark hair against the pillow, and the idea that Jason may already have begun to doze settled his nerves. With the utmost care he turned off the lamp on his bedside table, and carefully slid into bed.

Thunder rattled the windowpanes. Bruce focused on the sound of Jason's breathing, noting that it whistled very slightly in the little gap between his teeth. He thought of his lips, seemingly always chapped, red near the center, the lower so full it folded into a soft, pillow cleft at its middle –

"Bruce?"

His throat seized but he gave no outward indication of it.

"Yes, Jason?"

"Are you gonna put me off that case?"

"Is there a reason you shouldn't be on this case?" Bruce returned. He spoke more softly than he commonly did, and inflected the question in such a way that Jason rightly felt he did not have to answer.

But he did.

"Just because I guess…Because, I guess you might think…that maybe I'm too close to it, you know? Like you're always saying, about being focused, not too…not too close."

He was rambling, and Bruce could tell that he was searching for a way to express something no person his age should have had to express. He reached out in the darkness to cup his shoulder. Jason was facing away from him.

"I trust your instincts," he assured him, but Jason remained tense, pensive. He could feel the tautness of his muscles in his shoulder, smooth and warm.

"Yeah?" he muttered, and then, quietly, speaking half into his pillow: "then why'd we have to stop?"

"Stop what, Jason?"

"You know," he answered, and rain battered the windows. Bruce drew his hand back slowly.

"That doesn't have anything to do with your work," he returned after a long moment of thought. He felt satisfied, then, that he had steered the conversation back to its proper place.

"It has to do with the other thing," Jason replied pointedly.

Bruce hesitated.

"I want – the very best for you –"

"So it _is_ because of that," Jason concluded, "because I, because you think I'm damaged goods, or whatever."

There wasn't an ounce of facetiousness or the usual energy in his voice. On the contrary he sounded morose, frustrated, as he did when he would try and fail at some feat of manners, remembering the correct fork for a seafood course or the difference between a square and Windsor knot. It occurred to Bruce that this likely seemed like yet another failure, in his mind, to live up to some exacting standard.

"It's precisely the opposite," Bruce answered evenly, "it's that I don't want you to _become_ – damaged, if that's how you want to put it."

Jason shifted under the heavy blankets, turning to face Bruce, who could feel his piercing stare even in the darkness.

"But why would that happen, though? If both people are into it."

Bruce's restraint was weakening. Jason was being _honest,_ half pleading with him, and he had reduced him to it – not only through having touched him on those two occasions, but through rescuing him, through loving him, giving him some sense of security. When the two had met, Jason had lied about practically everything, even inconsequential things, as something of a defense mechanism. And now that had all dissipated, and the boy was raw and plaintive and moving toward him cautiously in the darkness.

"Jason," he breathed, and with both arms folded the boy against his chest, spreading one hand over the small of his back, the other between his sharp shoulder blades. At his age Dick had still felt coltish and bony; Jason, however, built muscle easily, and already had the solid, substantial feeling of a young man. Bruce inclined his head and smelled Jason's hair. He could feel the boy's hard prick pressed against him through his flannel pajama pants.

For a moment as the storm went on outside he was certain that Jason was trembling, or perhaps even crying. But as he felt the muscles in his shoulders flex, and then those in his lower back tense, he realized that Jason was only moving against him, shyly, but intentionally.

Bruce thought he might just let him go on that way, concealed and protected in his arms, building to climax on his own terms, at his own pace. He fantasized that Jason had never had it like that before, that his other encounters had been poisoned by fear or resentment, and he felt then the swell of paternal affection he sensed so acutely when teaching the boy.

"Do you like this, Jason?" he murmured in his ear. Jason shuddered at the vibration of Bruce's voice against him.

"Yeah," he returned, "it feels…"

His voice broke, as it had on occasion for sometime; he flushed with embarrassment and buried his face against Bruce's broad chest. Then he began to pluck open the little buttons of his pajama shirt, his hands moving awkwardly in the tight space between them. When he had opened it, Bruce smoothed it down off his shoulders with one smooth caress.

"Are you sure this is something that you want?"

Bruce asked him again mostly to hear him say it, but Jason moved up and kissed him instead, his soft mouth opening to wet, yielding heat. The corner of his jaw, which Bruce cupped as he rolled the boy easily onto his back, was smooth, flawless, never-shaven.

It was tempting to ruminate on Dick – the way he had resisted, how hurt he had seemed afterward, betrayed, really – and to speculate on the grim reasons Jason might have for behaving so differently.

"You don't – need – to do this – to ensure – anything," Bruce breathed between kisses. He smoothed Jason's hair back from his forehead, and felt his hands moving up and down his biceps.

"I _know_."

He gave an abrupt, stuttering moan when he arched up to wriggle out of his pajama bottoms, pressing the leaking tip of his penis against Bruce's stomach in the process. A smear of the fluid remained cooling on his mentor's skin, and as he fell back against the mattress another droplet slid into his own navel. He shivered, head tipped back, and breathed some mumbled plea.

Some strange emotion arose in Bruce. Jason was writhing, damp with sweat, his fingers teasing the tip of his own penis, trailing slick fluid down to the base.

Bruce collected both the boy's wrists in one hand – no struggle, really – and pinned them to the pillows above his head.

"This an _escape_ exercise –"

" _Hush_."

Jason grinned. His smile faltered into a gape when Bruce grasped their cocks together, the older man's naturally thicker and longer, though equally hard and dripping. He began to move – long, tight, twisting strokes, and the callouses on his hand had Jason _groaning_ – and he watched the boy's face, how his eyes fluttered closed and his brows knit together while a cherry-red stain spread over his cheeks.

After only a moment's frantic bucking Jason's penis pulsed in Bruce's hand and he cried out, spine bowing taut and trembling as he came hard and sudden. Bruce thrust his tongue into the open mouth now gasping for air and after only a few more pulls spilled thick streams of seed against him. Pleasure coursed through him as it hadn't in such a long time, emanating in clenching waves from the base of his belly to his extremities until his breathing finally began to steady.

Jason was still dazed, his eyes half-open. Bruce released his penis and ran his thumb through their commingled semen, then smeared it softly along Jason's lower lip. The boy licked it away without complaint, and swallowed.

"Jason."

"Mmm-hmm?"

"How do you feel?"

"Pretty damn good."

Correcting his language would have to wait. Bruce rose with effort and retrieved a wet hand towel from the bathroom, wringing it over the sink before returning to bed to tidy Jason up. And he needed it: in Bruce's absence he remained still, stretched with his arms over his head and his legs extended out fully, his naked belly covered in semen and a fading flush.

The sight was completely debauched, but Bruce found himself surprised not to feel that way about it. On the contrary, a peculiar possessiveness came over him as he gently toweled Jason off, gathering up each trace, from the shallow indentation of his navel to the smeared drop just beneath a pink nipple.

Jason watched him work, grinning.

"Can I stay?" he asked after Bruce had turned away to deposit the towel in a hamper.

"You may," Bruce replied simply, now moving back beneath the blankets. "Every night, if you like."

* * *

Alfred returned in good time, given the absence of traffic.

The house was silent. He collected fresh sheets from a hallway linen closet, and was not surprised to find that Bruce was not in his bed. After replacing the bedclothes he made up the pillows and comforter, then shut the door quietly behind him.

Tidying Tim's room was the next task at hand; the boy had packed quickly, and Alfred could not rest easily knowing he had left his room in disorder.

As he passed he noted the conspicuously open bedroom door just a few doors down from Tim's. He did not need to peer inside to know that Bruce was asleep on Jason's bed.

On nights like these, he usually was.


End file.
